Based on sensitivities to downtime, organizations can apply different strategies to protect (e.g., backup) business critical data. Although the data protection strategies can vary, effective data protection is a necessary part of an overall risk management strategy for a business. Some businesses elect to utilize the services of a third party service provider for managing their data protection. Such a service provider will frequently commit to a certain set of terms for the data protection, including, for example, backup data coverage, frequency of backup, mode of backup, and periodic testing of the backup.
Testing a backup (e.g., validating the integrity of backup images) is a critical part of a complete data protection environment. Such testing is necessary to evaluate the quality and completeness of the backup images, and enable any problems with the data protection to be identified and rectified prior to requiring use of the backup to recover data. However, this testing often gets low priority due to several factors, including: i) unavailability of the necessary hardware and software resources; ii) the required skill set for performing the testing effectively (e.g., labor intensive, intrusive/non-intrusive due to regulations that apply to the data); iii) sampling required from numerous backup images; and iv) scheduling the testing procedure.